


Pilot

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, aviation AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-08 15:57:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8851111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: A pilot walks into a bar. That's all you really need to know--and no, it's definitely not the start of a joke.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In 2001, after September 11th, I was trying to build a decorative wooden box/cabinet thing, using just hand tools. I’d started it several days before the events, and I was determined to finish, regardless. Predictably, it was a disaster; the box had no structural integrity, and the slip of a chisel left me with a deep wound (now a scar) at the base of my left palm. Weeks later, a good friend and I were commiserating about our general incompetence, right in that aftermath, and he said, “That’s the public art, the memorial we need: just a huge pile of things people were trying to do.” In that spirit, here’s a piece I started a week or so prior to this year's Election Day. It was intended to be short and ultimately sweet (similar in feel to [Hotel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3109115/chapters/6736037)). But like that futile box, it has no structural integrity; you’ll no doubt get an idea of how it’s meant to work, but it just _doesn’t_. It lurches around, overwritten, underwritten… I decided to finish it (or “finish” it) anyway, because: here is what I was trying to do. I haven’t forgotten about other stories, but it seemed better to take it out on this instead. P.S. This story, despite its being about a pilot, has nothing to do with Sept. 11. I’m just marking a similarity in my own emotional state.

“Double whiskey and soda.”

The words are clipped and low. Helena Wells is not surprised by that drink order, for the person issuing it is a pilot. That the whiskey-and-soda pilot is in this case a woman is slightly unusual, but most people, Helena has noted in her relatively short career thus far as a bartender, do drink according to position, not gender. She places an ice cube in a tumbler, fills the tumbler with the bar’s well bourbon, adds a brief spray of soda, and places it in front of the pilot, whose eyes have followed Helena as she assembled the drink. Her gaze now meets Helena’s in cool appraisal.

Helena has not seen this pilot before. She’s seen this look, however; all pilots seem to know it and use it. Flight attendants do not. Flight attendants deploy smiles that do not reach their eyes.

Helena is becoming familiar with the looks proffered by flight attendants and pilots because the establishment whose bar she began to tend not long ago is located near both an airport and a hotel where flight crews are customarily housed. The hotel does not have a bar of its own, a fact for which Helena is grateful: she is also becoming familiar with the fact that people who travel for a living tend to tip well.

This pilot bears out that tendency: she finishes her drink, drops a ten and two fives on the bar. The ice cube remains, largely unmelted, in the glass. She says, “Thanks.” Then she stands and walks away, away and out, nodding to a flight attendant as she leaves.

She’s tall, this pilot.

“The pilot,” Helena says to the flight attendant when he comes to the bar, after a bit, to place an order, “who was here earlier.”

He smiles. It’s genuine. “Captain Bering,” he says.

“How did you know who I meant?” Helena asks.

“The way you said ‘the pilot.’”

And somehow Helena knows precisely what he means.

Three weeks later, the tall pilot—Captain Bering—returns. Just as before, she sits at the bar; just as before, she orders a double whiskey and soda. But this time, she smiles at Helena. She says, “I remember you.”

Helena says, “Thank you.” She is struck by what a strange thing this is to have said, but—

“You’re welcome,” says the pilot. She downs her drink, drops two bills—tens—on the bar. “I’ll remember you next time, too.”

“Then I’ll thank you again,” Helena says. That earns her a smile—but one still tinged with appraisal.

Helena has never bothered to distinguish among the uniforms worn by crews of various airlines. But she now finds herself looking for a particular configuration of dark blue fabric striped at the sleeve with gold braid…

Two weeks pass. Then: “Hi,” says the pilot. “Told you I’d remember.”

“And I told you I would thank you again. Which I do.”

“You’re welcome again.”

Helena places a double whiskey and soda—made this time with bourbon from a bottle that lives on a high shelf—in front of the pilot and notes, “You’re not the only one with a memory.” After a second’s consideration, she adds, “Captain Bering.”

The pilot laughs. “I guess I do wear a nametag,” she says, and Helena does not correct the misapprehension. The pilot sips her drink. Then she smiles widely, and the corners of her eyes move. “But it’s Myka.” Now she’s the one who seems to consider briefly. “Going to quid pro quo me?”

“Helena.”

Myka drinks two whiskey-and-sodas that night. She says, as she leaves the bar, “I hope I’ll see you next time, Helena.”

The next time, as Myka sips at her drink, made once again with pricey whiskey, she tells Helena, “I’ve been in a lot of bars. You aren’t a typical bartender.”

“I’m a relatively inexperienced bartender,” Helena says, and her next words slip out before she can stop them. “I wouldn’t have chosen it.”

“So why did you?”

“I’m a convicted felon.”

“Pardon?” Myka asks, but her eyes do not widen. Instead, she tilts her head, as if Helena has said something odd about the weather.

“Yes. I like to be honest. I am a convicted felon, and this is the job I managed to be hired to do.”

“You’re a convicted felon in _this_ country?”

“Yes. People generally don’t, or I suppose wouldn’t, guess. So I am up-front. So there are no surprises.” Not that it matters what this pilot thinks of her… but in any case, this is what she says. To people. Who generally don’t or wouldn’t guess. And in any case, she usually goes on, as she does now, “I would say there were extenuating circumstances, but doesn’t everyone believe that their actions are in some way excusable? So in fact I make no excuses for my actions. And I have paid my debt to society.” She did not need to volunteer the information to Myka. But she for some reason does not want to have to offer a belated confession—or damning revelation—to this upright, uniformed woman. She tries not to interrogate why she imagines she might find herself needing to confess to this upright, uniformed woman at a later time.

Nothing changes between them, nothing but the subject—they move on to, of all things, a discussion of Myka’s hat and the range of documents she stores inside it: it sits upside down on the bar, and it looks strangely like a round, disorganized filing cabinet. “Everybody does it,” Myka defends herself against Helena’s disbelief at the idea that pilots consistently use their hats as adjunct attaché cases. Myka sighs and asks the bar at large, “Who’s got a schedule or a chart in their cap?” Helena is astonished by the number of hands that rise; Myka asks, smugly, for another drink.

Nothing changes… Helena supposes there was and is, to be honest, nothing of true substance between them _to_ change. They talk in a bar. At irregular intervals. That is what they do. And indeed, in two weeks, their conversation resumes, post-pleasantries, as if they had only briefly paused.

Myka says, “That’s why you live here. Because of the women’s correctional facility.”

“I’m surprised you know it.”

“The flight crew has to be informed when someone’s being escorted. To.”

“Prison. You can say it.”

“Prison. Can you leave? Town, I mean.”

“I suppose I could. But I have a daughter.” Helena notes that this news does make Myka’s eyes react. “And a friend was kind enough to move himself here, with my daughter, when my incarceration began.”

“That seems like a big deal. For a friend.”

“It was a big deal. For a friend. For anyone, it would have been, and it continues to be one. I owe him more than could be repaid. And while I was incarcerated, he built a life—built a life for himself and for her. I wouldn’t ask them to leave those lives, not simply to… get away.”

“So you tend bar.”

“So I do.”

Myka finishes her drink. She says, “I have to go. Crew rest.” But she leans across the bar and briefly touches Helena’s upper arm. Helena has been conditioned by prison to find uninvited contact threatening… and she has not been out nearly long enough to have overcome that conditioning. Yet she does not flinch away.

****

“So I tend bar,” Helena says two weeks later. She is holding a drink-filled tumbler, which she has not yet set in front of Myka. “What about you?”

Myka holds out her hand for the glass. Helena moves it slightly higher and back: away from her. Myka shrugs. “I’m a pilot. You must have met tons of pilots.” She reaches for the drink again.

Helena shakes her head. “Quid pro quo, Captain Bering.”

“That’s fair, but… that’s all.” To Helena’s skeptical eyebrow, she responds, “I swear.”

Helena considers. “Where do you live?” she asks.

“SLC. With my husband. In theory.”

“Theory?” Helena finds, suddenly, that the tease is no longer amusing. Or perhaps the glass is too heavy, or too slippery, to keep in her hand. She sets it down.

“He’s a pilot too. Our schedules… plus we fly for different airlines.”

“I see.”

Myka sips. Then she says, “I was in the military. Before.” This is volunteered as if it is a real revelation.

“Were you.”

“I flew fighters. Mostly F-22s.”

“Did you enjoy that?”

“More than anything in life.”

Myka’s voice is still low and controlled—Helena suspects that “controlled” might really be Myka’s middle name—but her vehemence is unmistakable. “Then why did you leave the military?” Helena asks, hoping this is the right question.

Myka sets the glass in front of her and stares at it. She drums the fingers of both hands against its slightly sweaty surface. The action creates a spray of tiny water droplets. “You think you know who you are. What you want.”

“But?”

Myka shrugs, and Helena nods. Then she says, to make Myka smile, “And yet you chose another profession requiring a uniform.”

Myka smiles.

The next time, Myka asks, “How old is your daughter?”

“Eight. Do you—you and your husband—have children?”

“No. That wouldn’t work.”

“Given the theoretical nature of—”

“Right. We can’t even have a dog.”

“Do you want a dog?”

“No.” It’s more a dismissive laugh than a word.

“Does he?”

“I don’t know.” Myka lifts her drink and swirls it; she drinks the final bit of alcohol the glass contains. Then she sets it back down, and she and Helena both watch the ice melt.

In three weeks’ time—Myka usually presents herself on a Friday or Saturday night, either every other week or every third, and Helena continues to forget, when confronted with Myka’s actual presence, to ask in detail about piloting schedules and how they are determined—Helena looks up from a credit-card receipt to find that Myka has somehow snuck in: she is sitting at the bar, smiling a smile that widens as Helena meets her eyes. Helena fumbles the receipt into the register, and to cover her surprise, she grabs the first glass that comes to hand and begins to fill it… she is using only the soda hose, she soon realizes, as Myka says, “I hope that one’s not for me.”

“Don’t you ever want to try a different drink?” Helena asks, only half in fun.

“No. But I like to watch you make them.”

A chilly fizz against the fingers of Helena’s left hand, wrapped around the glass, draws her attention to the fact that she has overfilled it.

“You can’t have liked seeing that,” Helena says. But she does have to acknowledge that Myka’s… visits? is that how she should characterize them? have run in parallel with her own progress as a bartender. Her instinct for measurements has been good since the beginning, as have her inclinations regarding what to mix with what to satisfy vague requests—something fruity but not _too_ fruity; something strong but not _too_ strong; something different but not _too_ different. But she moves more smoothly now; her muscles remember the customary spot of each implement below the bar, each bottle behind and above it.

“What’s new?” Myka asks, once she has her proper drink.

“With regard to what? Drinks you don’t want me to make for you?”

“Sure. Tell me that.”

“Craft tequilas. Strangely, traditional whiskey drinks made with craft tequilas.”

“I do not want a double tequila and soda.”

“Tequila Manhattan?” Myka’s response to this query: a face of disgust that makes Helena laugh and say, “I can’t imagine you’d like a Manhattan of any variety.”

“Ver _mouth_.” Myka makes the face again and throws in an exaggerated shudder.

“I will never offer you a martini,” Helena vows.

Naturally, someone steps up to the bar to request just that.

Myka maintains an exaggeratedly revolted expression throughout the mixological process, but her eyes do follow the movement of Helena’s hands. Helena’s own aspect—she can feel it not just on her face, but in the warmth throughout her body—is one of self-consciousness. But it is a self-consciousness that threatens to transmute itself into delight.

****

“What did you do?” Myka asks.

Helena stiffens; despite her desire to be up-front, she does not like, has never liked, will never like answering this question. But after months of intermittent conversations, Myka does have some right to ask it. So Helena answers it. “I assaulted a police officer.”

“Oh. No, I meant before you became a bartender.”

Inexplicably annoyed by Myka’s phlegmatic “oh” and also, equally inexplicably, by her nonspecific clarification, Helena says, “I worked in the correctional facility’s data entry department.”

Myka’s eyes soften. “And before that?”

“I was a materials engineer.” As a concession, to make up for her brief descent into snappish self-pity, Helena offers, “And you’ll laugh at this.”

“I will?”

“My area: composite materials. Specifically, for the control surfaces of aircraft wings.”

“I do find that a little ironic.” Myka laughs a very gentle, non-pilot laugh.

“I thought you might.”

****

“So did you do it?” Myka asks.

“Do what?”

“Assault a police officer.”

Oh. So, now. “I told you, I offer no excuses.”

“That’s what you told me.” She pauses. “But that’s not what I asked.”

“To answer what you asked: I did. Yes, I did. But I…” Helena tries to be honest with herself, and since being released from prison—for prison is no place for honesty or the honest—she has tried to be as truthful as possible with the world at large. Myka is part of the world at large. So that has to be the reason she continues speaking. “The police officer—a police detective, more specifically—took an interest in me.” Myka waits. “And I had no interest in him.” Myka waits some more. “I thought that would be the end of it.”

“But it wasn’t.”

Helena shakes her head. “Over time, the situation escalated.”

Myka says, “Escalated. To assault?” Helena hesitates, then nods. “Escalated to assault committed by you?” Helena nods again. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

“How do you know what sounds like me?” Helena asks. But she should not be defensive: Myka has listened to her. With attention.

“I’ve lost count of the whiskey and sodas you’ve made for me.”

“I wonder if the plural might be whiskeys and soda. As in attorneys general.” She mixes Myka a second drink. “Two tonight, to add to whatever number neither of us has counted. I did commit the assault.”

“But?”

“But nothing. I committed aggravated assault. I was offered a plea deal that included, all things considered, a relatively short incarceration.” She laughs without humor. “I behaved well.”

“That doesn’t sound like you either. What ‘all things’ were considered?”

“All the things said by the police officer I assaulted.”

“Were they true?”

“I’d prefer not to lie to you,” Helena says.

“I withdraw the question.”

Helena believes that she means it. But she has begun, and lies by omission are still lies. Truth is whole truth. “He threatened my daughter. He said that if I would not… he threatened my daughter. So instead of sleeping with him, I tried to kill him.” Myka’s gaze remains steady. Helena shrugs. “It wasn’t a very _good_ try. Heat of the moment. Unpremeditated. And obviously unsuccessful.” Helena has been unable to keep herself from wishing that otherwise. Despite the consequences for her… because at least, then, the greatest of consequences for him, too. “Of course once I had done it, what could I say? My reason was at best irrelevant. And he made sure, in any case, that I would not think of airing that reason, certainly not in a public trial, and not even behind closed official doors. He made very sure.”

“You went to prison to protect your daughter,” Myka surmises immediately.

“I went to prison because I pleaded guilty to the charge of aggravated assault.”

“You went to prison to protect your daughter.”

“I went to prison because I was sentenced to serve two years in a state correctional facility.”

“You went to prison to protect your daughter.”

Helena can’t think of anything else truthful to say.

“I notice you haven’t denied it,” Myka says.

“I went to prison.” She picks up Myka’s whiskey and soda and takes a swallow. It isn’t her favorite drink, but it will do to stop her mouth.

“I’m sorry. I pushed. I shouldn’t have.” Myka puts her hand over Helena’s, on the bar.

Helena lets the warm hand stay, even flexes slightly into the pressure. “Well. It’s true that I am the bartender in this relationship,” she weak-jokes. “I should be your confessor, not the other way around.”

“What do you want to know?”

Helena discards the question that leaps immediately to her tongue. Instead she asks, “Why are you still here?”

“What?”

“It’s late. Later than usual. I don’t want to have been responsible for your violating regulations.”

“Oh,” Myka says. She looks down at their hands, resting together. “I guess it _is_ late.”

It is so late that very few people are in the bar; only one of the servers remains, and she sits at a table, reading a magazine. An awareness clicks in Helena’s head: she and Myka have never been alone.

“I’ll have to close soon,” she says. She would slide her hand away unobtrusively, if she could, but she can find no way to make her movement seem like anything less than a retreat.

“I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

Now, Helena does not speak the single word that she wants to blurt—“don’t”—but instead she watches Myka collect her coat and hat from the bar stool next to her. She listens to Myka say, in a mutter to herself, “I guess I should call home, too.”

After she is gone, Helena finds herself both relieved and frustrated at having failed to ask the question that had come to her so abruptly and unexpectedly: Why are you married?

Helena has always been inclined to hold her emotions very close, and prison exacerbated that tendency. She had not before, and she has not since, felt connected to anyone but her friend, Steve, to whom she owes everything, and her daughter, Christina, to whom she owes everything else.

And Myka is married. “My husband”: these are words she has so often said. Helena has let herself pretend, pretend but also believe, that that figure stood between them, that Myka could not have been coming nearer and nearer, of course not. Could not have been moving her hand nearer and nearer, could not have been prying loose that close hold, finding an open space in Helena’s thoughts. Her thoughts. Her thoughts that are so inappropriate that she for so long refused to admit that she had them.

Servers at the bar have their liaisons with flight crew members. Helena watches this happen; she has become accustomed to watching this happen. And she has tried not to admit to herself, certainly not to her waking self, that she thinks about that, about how, when Myka walks into the bar—every time she walks into the bar, every time she spends the night in this small city—they might exchange a look, some quiet words of greeting, just as they do now; but then Myka might, after a time, murmur a number into Helena’s ear. Helena might, after closing, go to the hotel across the street and knock softly on the door of a room bearing that number.

She knows this is the stuff of fantasy—not just lurid physical fantasy, but also storybook tale-spinnings: if not happily ever after, then some sort of contented stretching into a gauzy future. She sees an everyday life of child, friend, and work, a quite acceptable everyday life, but one that might erupt into episodes of brief, breathless transcendence.

When thoughts of Myka visit her, during that everyday life that features no transcendence, she tries not to react. But she cannot always keep herself from pursuing those ideas…

During one such chase, Steve asks her, “Are you thinking about prison?”

“No,” Helena says.

But some time later, she revises her statement to: “Not as such.”

Steve nods. “Let me know if you need help.”

Being with Christina is easiest, nearly objectively _easy_ , because Christina can’t help but demand to be put uppermost in Helena’s mind. Can’t help but demand “uppermost” as her rightful place in Helena’s mind. How wrong is it to be glad of one’s child because she is a distraction? (But then, she had used thoughts of Christina in precisely this manner, to winch her way through her incarceration: what is Christina doing at this precise moment in her day? What is Christina reading tonight? What is the homework over which she is furrowing her small brow? What slight variation on macaroni and cheese will she have requested for her supper?) Uppermost.

But Helena tries to be honest with herself. So she feels she must admit—must in fact truly admit, in the sense of _allow in_ , allow fully in, into her head and particularly her heart—that she is in love with a married woman. A married woman whom she sees twice a month if she is lucky, once a month if she is not.

And she has to admit, too, what her unbidden question—Why are you married?—really means. It is a wail, an it’s-not-fair wail, one that begs, Why _must it be true that you are_ married?

TBC

 

original tumblr tags (slightly edited): this is what I was trying to do, and it did not work, as a lot of things are systemically not working, (or working all too well), Nov. 8 being only the latest example, anyway, what you will find as we proceed, is that Steve is undeveloped, Christina is undeveloped, and while Myka and Helena were always meant to reveal themselves through conversation, they too are missing several salient pieces, I will always look on this failure with regret, but testaments are necessary too, and once this is over, I will try to get back to some healthier programming


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m not a pilot myself, but I do know many, many of that strange breed. And they are strange—but of course every profession that requires true dedication is strange, right? And so are you drawn to, and do you succeed at, such a profession because you already possess its requisite idiosyncrasies, or can you just fall in and pick them up as you go? Beats me. Flying’s weird. That we can do it at all is weird, and it’s even weirder that it’s the only thing some people want to do with their lives. This thing we invented barely a century ago, that’s the only thing they want to do. One of the things I would have done in this story, if I’d been able to, was think that out with some care. But oh well. This is just the next part of a story that began with some bartender getting herself fascinated by some tall pilot.

The next time Helena sees Myka, she fears that some god has heard her thoughts and decided to punish her, because Myka is with a man. He is tall, he is handsome, and he too is uniformed as a pilot. He is saying something to her as they walk into the bar, and Myka laughs. She is _at ease_ with him, and Helena nearly dies. _Oh no_ , she thinks, _this is the husband_. This is the husband, and now Helena will have to watch them together, be sickened by the idea of them together—it’s a punishment from that god, it must be, a punishment for her heinous inability to keep herself from wanting and wanting and wanting someone whom she cannot have. A punishment for the ache in her hands, the dryness of her mouth, the constant burning _readiness_ of her body.

And she cannot keep herself from whipping a lash of anger at Myka for bringing him here, which is completely unreasonable, because Myka doesn’t know how Helena feels—she cannot know—and Helena tries to explain to herself quite rationally that Myka is not flaunting anything; that is _not_ what she is doing. But when Myka says “Hi” just as she always does, in just the same near-intimate undertone that she always uses—or that she always has used, since she and Helena became friends, or whatever it is they are—Helena knows that a friend would not be so cold as to answer that greeting, that always-offered sweet nuance of a greeting, with a terse “Hello, Captain.” But that is what she answers, and of course Myka stiffens, but she recovers swiftly, and Helena falls in love with her _again_ —and how many times does this add up to? (well, how many times has Myka walked into this bar?)—for the strong schooling she gives her face. And her voice: no note in that voice gives any hurt away as Myka says, “Right. Pete Lattimer, this is Helena Wells. Helena, this is my friend Pete. We don’t get to fly together much, but he’s my first officer on this line today.”

Her friend. Her first officer. This man is Myka’s copilot. He is not the husband. Helena should have registered at first sight that he is wearing the same uniform that Myka does, but her jealousy blinded her… and now if only she could sink down behind the bar and never stand up again, because her reaction must have laid bare all the thoughts she has had, standing right in front of Myka—and she has tried so very hard when she is right in front of Myka to _not think about_ what she cannot keep from thinking about when she is not right in front of Myka (but instead wishing she were in front of her, behind her, over her, under her)… “Pete Lattimer,” Helena repeats. The weakness of her voice appalls her; Myka, she is sure, will hear the relief. “Pete Lattimer,” she tries again. “I’m so very pleased to meet you. Perhaps a bit surprised—Myka tends not to bring her coworkers with her. Here. She doesn’t bring them here.”

Pete gives Helena a look she can’t decipher. “She’s always been kinda lone-wolf-y. Even back in pilot training.”

“Pilot training? So you were in the military together?”

Myka says, “We were.” She smiles, and Helena lives again. “Do you write down everything I tell you?”

“Just the most salient points,” Helena tries to joke. The words come out completely seriously, however, despite the fact that she has never written down a single word about Myka. She has not needed to.

****

Talking to Myka becomes more difficult, but more desired, now that Helena has admitted these things to herself. And at least Helena is still free—or “free”—to anticipate those times when Myka will stride in, will sit down, will offer that simple “Hi.”

Or when she will surprise Helena. One Friday, Helena is carefully constructing a layered drink—she does enjoy the precision with which they must be assembled, the slow and steady pour they require, the way their dependence on physical properties takes her, for those few moments of making, back to her former life. The streaming of absinthe over a bar spoon is of less consequence than the coursing of air over an aileron, but fluid is fluid, and a control surface is a control surface.

As she sets the absinthe bottle down, she hears, “Smile!” She looks up, and there is Myka, her mobile phone at the ready to take a photograph—only a week has elapsed since her last stopover, and Helena is dazzled to be seeing her again so soon. She has no time to rein in the requested smile, and she is embarrassed when Myka turns the phone around to show her the picture.

“Look at you,” Myka says. “Engineering those materials.”

Helena harrumphs. “Mind-reader,” she says. Myka shrugs her shoulders and hiccups out a self-satisfied, oddly euphoric giggle. Helena has never heard her make such a noise. “Are you feeling all right?”

First Myka nods, then she shrugs again. “Weird landing a little while ago. Everybody was okay, but you’ll probably read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

“Are you part of that ‘everybody’?”

“Hm?” Myka’s response is absently interrogative; she is looking down at her telephone’s screen. At the picture she just took? _Egotist_ , Helena sneers at herself. _Lovestruck egotist_. She clears her throat and says, “You said everybody was okay. Including you?”

“I’m fine. That’s what they pay me for, really.”

“Being fine?”

Again the uncharacteristic giggle. “Landings. Well, takeoffs and landings, but mostly landings.” She looks at the drink Helena has set in front of her. “And I guess for being fine, too, during those takeoffs and landings.”

“But mostly landings.”

“Mostly. If something’s going to go wrong, that’s usually when. You know at the end of a flight, the crew’s by the door, and there’s the thank yous and you’re welcomes while the passengers deplane?”

The change in topic seems a non sequitur, but Helena says, “Of course.”

“Some pilots think that’s stupid. Unnecessary. They hate doing it. But even if the flight doesn’t end up like today, even if it’s uneventful… we all went through something together. So thanks seem right. I mean, that’s what I think. What do you think?” Myka is drumming her fingers, but not as she customarily does, idly, tip-tip-tipping against her glass, but in an irregular, surprisingly loud gallop atop the bar.

“What do I think…” Helena begins. _I think I want to hold you and gentle these jitters out of you_. But no, be honest; stop it at: _I think I want to hold you_. “I think on your own flights, you’re the pilot. You’re the only pilot whose opinion matters.”

How does the husband (Helena does not know his name; Myka may have said it at some point, but Helena does not want to know his name) feel about these ritual thanks? Has Myka spoken to him about them? If she had, would she feel so compelled to speak of them now? So compelled to speak of them, so free to speak of them. With Helena.

Free. Free. Myka’s appearances in the bar have begun to feel unnervingly like those removed-from-time interludes when Steve would bring Christina into the correctional facility’s visitors center, when somehow they would steal their way into being themselves and not these aliens, a prisoner and two tourists from the outside world.

That feeling, and this feeling, are they anything like the way Myka feels when she flies? When Myka talks about being a pilot, it sounds dreary and overscheduled and this line and that leg and completely uninteresting. Yet when she talks about flying… but then again, flight: it’s a painfully obvious, heavy-handed metaphor for freedom. And pilots, Helena tries to persuade her instinctively romanticizing self, are nothing more than bus drivers glorified by that metaphor.

Four weeks pass this time before Helena sees Myka again—and in complete contravention of their… custom? habit? Well, if Helena is going to think in metaphor, she supposes Myka _is_ a habit… in complete contravention of that, Myka is waiting for Helena outside, in the bar’s parking lot, after Helena has closed.

“I’m surprised to see you,” Helena says, even as she is marveling at how near Myka she can stand, with no bar between them, on the pretense of simple, innocent conversation. “See you here in the lot, I mean, but also, it’s been some time.”

“I was here. Two Sundays ago, I was here. We were in a delay, and it pushed us to Sunday.”

“Sunday. My one day off. I’m sorry I missed you.”

“I’m sorry too. I thought we were friends.”

Helena fears her confusion must be very evident as she says, “We are friends. Rather, I thought so too. Think so.”

“You don’t understand. I thought we were _friends_.”

“No, I don’t understand.”

“And then you weren’t here. And I knew. I knew how wrong I’d been. Because you weren’t here, and—” And she reaches out, pulls Helena to her, kisses her with force but tenderness too, with a trembling intensity.

No modesty: their mouths open to each other immediately—Myka has had a drink somewhere else, and jealousy at the taste of whiskey poured by someone else’s hand makes Helena push harder. That jealousy and a rising greed darken the kiss, which now seems to have always been predestined. So much so that even in darkness, even in sinful shadow, it should be ecstatic, a fulfillment…

And yet all Helena can think is _consequences_ , because she knows with such certainty that grim physical inevitabilities always have consequences. The action—the kiss connects, the blow lands—then the consequences.

The blow lands. No: she landed the blow; she landed many blows. She had not known, not at all, how flesh would be so thickly resistant to other flesh. She had imagined that the sound of impact would be acute—crack of bone on bone—but the sharpness was instead buried within a pulpy baffle.

That sound is perfect, in its way, in that no other sound truly replicates it. Helena has not been able to listen to fight scenes on television or in movies, not since. “That is the wrong sound,” she once said out loud in front of Steve and Christina.

“Good,” Steve said.

Do you understand what you are doing, the judge had asked during her plea allocution.

Yes, she said. And would have followed that with, I understand that I am doing the only thing that can be done.

She does the only thing that can be done now: she pulls away.

She is sincerely, and perversely, gratified that Myka looks damaged.

“You know about evidence,” Myka says after a breath. Her voice: damage there, too.

“Evidence,” Helena repeats. The kiss connects, the blow lands.

“There’s a picture of you, on my phone. Why did I take it?”

“Because you— _we_ —were acting as people in love do,” Helena wishes she could say, because now she knows that to say _we_ is correct, that it has been correct. But she cannot say that, not when Myka is speaking like this, tense and tortured, still speaking and saying, “And he asked, ‘who’s that.’”

“He asked,” Helena echoes. “What did you say.”

“Nothing. For maybe only a few seconds, but it was long enough. Because I couldn’t find an answer. Because I hadn’t let myself think the real answer.”

Myka letting herself think the real answer has solved nothing, Helena can see that. She felt it in the kiss, after the first hungry astonishment, and she sees it now.

Myka breathes heavily as she goes on, “And Pete. I said to Pete, ‘Isn’t she great?’ About you. And he didn’t say anything either. For maybe only a few seconds. And I didn’t understand. Now I do.” She bows her head. Then she raises it, and some stray particle from the streetlight nearest the parking lot catches in her shining eyes. Her shining, sad eyes. “I can’t fly this line anymore. You understand why, don’t you? You understand what will happen if I come back here, don’t you?”

“No,” Helena says, but of course she does understand; she understands exactly what will happen, and in this moment she would live through everything again, prison and all the rest, if that would make it happen. “No,” she repeats.

“It isn’t fair, what I’m doing. I didn’t know what I was doing, but now I do, and I need to be fair. To both of you.”

“No,” Helena says for a third time. Because it is supremely _unfair_. The entire situation is unfair: he happened to meet Myka first, he had a head start, and now he gets a chance—an _undeserved_ chance, she snarl-sobs inside her head—to repair something that is broken, while Helena gets no chance to build anything at all.

Myka confesses—or rather, says in the tone of a confession—“What I’m doing to him. Helena, I bid for this line. Every month, I bid for it.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Myka doesn’t explain, just continues to confess: “He would ask what I got, and I’d… I don’t know. Act like it happened by chance sometimes, but… but I bid for this, for anything that would bring me through here, put me up at that hotel across the street from you. How didn’t I know what that meant?”

“You didn’t want to know what it meant.”

“I thought it was just—some pilots like lines that others don’t. Some pilots like certain airports, runways… I thought it was like that. But it’s like this instead.” She raises her right hand, just a little; she may not even be aware that she has moved. The hand is a question—a request?—no, a question, or several questions, and Helena doesn’t know the right answers to any of them.

Right, wrong. “One more kiss,” Helena begs, because this is everything; she has never felt like this, never wanted like this, never had her body explain to her precisely—candidly— _truthfully_ —what it wants, what it will keep on wanting. “One.”

“I can’t,” Myka says. “I can’t. If I kiss you again, I won’t leave.”

“What if I kiss you instead?” Responsibility, liability, guilt—Helena would bear all of that motive burden, if only, if only…

But Myka shakes her head. “I made a promise, and I can’t break it without turning into someone else.” She takes a step back, away.

Stupid pilot. Stupid tall pilot. “I don’t want someone else. I want _you_. I _want_ you.”

“It won’t help at all for me to say I want you too.”

“It won’t help at all.”

“I want you too. I can’t come back here.”

Helena would like to hate Myka for the way she can just fly away—as that police officer, that _cop_ , could fly away—back into a blameless life. Helena cannot keep from entangling herself with the blameless.

The days now creep by; inevitably they join together into weeks, weeks and months, to slink and writhe away. As they go, Helena comes to realize that she is no longer brought up short by the sight of uniforms from Myka’s airline. She loosens her grip on the hope that Myka will spontaneously change her mind—will change herself into that someone else who would break a promise. Unfair… “You understand what will happen if I come back here, don’t you?” Helena could not, for a long while, keep herself from imagining it in sordid but ecstatic detail, how she might discover the secrets of that body that she had barely begun to touch.

Months later, on a Sunday night, Helena goes out to dinner with a very nice, very pretty teacher from Christina’s school. Helena asks herself if she wants to truly respond to her lovely companion’s obvious interest—but she knows that if she has to ask herself, the answer is that she does not want to. If a tall pilot were the one sitting across this restaurant table from her, she would not be asking herself anything at all. Not asking, not answering: she would be knocking the table out of the way.

But this impulse will fade, because it must. Just as the heart-lift at the sight of the uniform is fading, has faded, so will this impulse.

At the end of the evening, she is friendly. She says a polite “good night” and goes home, where Steve takes one look at her face and asks, “Are you thinking about prison?”

“Not as such.”

She has been a bartender for two years.

Her ability to ignore any given part of the past waxes and wanes.

TBC

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 2 tumblr tags: poor lovestruck things, nobody's ever really free, but I do suppose that one of the things about pilots, is that they think they are in a special class, to whom gravity doesn't fully apply, and the funny scientific thing is, we don't actually know how gravity works, it's the least understood of the four fundamental forces, so who knows, maybe they're right


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not to get overly political as I conclude this piece that came about, in its current form, because of politics, but I do want to say that what I have found—and continue to find—particularly disheartening is the way harshness, in speech and thought and action, is being put forth as, and mistaken for, truth. Ignorance is cloaking itself in virtue, pretending to be some necessary corrective to a straw man of elitism… whereas me, I respect the dogged doing of homework that leads to expertise. The reading of such things as historical papers, medical texts, briefing books… flight manuals. Pilots who don’t know their stuff are likely to fly into the ground, right? I also happen to like bartenders who know what they’re doing. And having brought it back to the subject, I’ll be quiet now.

Life sometimes seems to Helena a matter of gathering oneself to leap from one date of significance to another—accruing more such dates as time progresses. Her own birthday, a neutral given. More positive: the birthday of her child. That of her best friend. Not so: the date of her incarceration. More difficult to evaluate: the date of her release. On the first anniversary of that day, Steve had asked her if she wanted a celebration. Her gut twisted at the thought, but he went on, “I think Christina does.”

Today is their third annual “Mom got out of prison” party. Helena is unsure as to whether she should hope that Christina will one day exhibit some embarrassment about the topic, but for now… she accepts a large wrapped package from her daughter while also regarding a cake frosted with a picture of an open door. Three spindly, baby-pink birthday candles stand in a line across the cake’s midsection, mocking her: some little girl’s playset version of prison bars. The whole thing is absurd.

Helena takes no joy in observing this day.

But Christina urges “Open your present!” with great excitement, so Helena tries to resist the pull backwards, the idea of this day as a spur to _think about it_. She removes the wrapping paper to find a leather case. “Now open that!” Christina enthuses.

Helena obliges.

It’s a set of bar tools. “Surprise!” shouts Christina.

And it is certainly a surprise: to find that she can feel still worse on this day.

Helena’s resolve to be honest with the world at large does not include revealing any dissatisfaction—about _anything_ —to Christina. “They’re lovely,” Helena declares. “I’ll take them to work with me tonight, and everyone will ask me how I came to own such a striking collection.”

“She’s been saving up for a long time,” Steve says.

“I’m very impressed,” Helena says, and Christina beams.

When Christina leaves the room to fetch plates on which to serve the cake, Steve murmurs, “You know she thinks you have that job because you like it.”

“I don’t _dislike_ it,” Helena says, and that at least is true. She did dislike it when she began, but that seems now to have been simple resentment, a fully dismissive _I am too good for this_ snobbery. And fortunately, so soon thereafter, Myka had materialized as the marvelous, beautiful distraction she was, giving Helena something to anticipate, someone for whom to perform.

Then Myka went away—Helena knows she will not enjoy marking any anniversaries of that day, either, although at least she can be certain that no one will force her to contemplate a cake featuring an airplane—and Helena backslid, a bit, into being offended by her circumstances. 

She could not identify a moment when she truly gave up her hope of seeing Myka again—she fears she will never truly give up that hope—but she did come slowly to understand that some bulky weight that had adorned her heart had migrated to another, far interior cabinet. And once she had closed that cabinet, she began simply to _go to work_. To relinquish conceits about how things could be different. To take some satisfaction in showing up and doing a job. In showing up and doing _this_ job. (In learning to make drinks that Myka would hear of from another bartender.) In being a bartender.

Helena tries to be honest with herself. She is a bartender, a bartender for whom her daughter has bought bar tools. If she cannot say to herself with complete honesty that she has given up the past, then that will have to stand as something she cannot say to herself… but she goes to work, and she opens her case, and she does her job using the strainer, the spoon, the tongs, the jigger (“It has a handle,” Christina had pointed out with pride). She uses as many of the implements as she can, so she can tell Christina tomorrow, in detail, that she did.

But she also must say to herself, if she is to be honest with that self, that it is far more difficult not to think about prison while using tools so thoughtfully gifted to her _solely because_ she was in, and is now not in, prison. As such.

“Helena,” she hears as she is locking the bar’s back door at a bit past two-thirty a.m. She tenses, because while this is generally a safe place, one never knows… and a voice in the night generally means nothing good… she grips the handle of the new case tightly, poised to swing a sharp corner into a skull if necessary. But then her brain catches up with what her ears heard, and she turns around. She does not see what she expects: the figure is tall but she is not uniform-clad, not straitened as in the past; she wears jeans and her hair is long and wild and curly. Surely she cannot be glowing, surely not; that is the streetlight, sending off illuminating waves, surely that is all, but Myka as a civilian is… Helena cannot let herself think “irresistible,” because if that is true, then she is lost. Lost, lost, lost. She will do something impermissible, inexcusable. But one more kiss… she could have that one more kiss she had begged for, months ago… she would have at least that on her tongue; at least that one small morsel in her mouth…

How can she for so very long have been—how can she still be—so very much in love with someone and never before have seen her hair down?

“Helena,” Myka says again. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Helena tries to say. Possibly she said a word; possibly she did not. All she knows is that she moved her mouth.

Then Myka’s mouth moves, and she does say a word: “Decide.”

“What?” There is no such thing as deciding. There is only doing what must be done… and now Helena must stare, possibly openmouthed, at a sight that has instantly re-encumbered her heart.

“Do you know what ‘decide’ means, to a commercial pilot?”

“I’m sure my guess would be wrong,” Helena chokes out.

“When we’re landing. The altimeter tells us—out loud, it tells us—how far we are from the ground. Depending on the aircraft, we’ll hear different words, but basically it’s a backwards countdown on the descent. And at a certain point, it says ‘decide.’”

“And what is it that you decide?”

“Whether we can see well enough to land.”

Helena doesn’t say anything.

“Every landing we hear that call. Sometimes I hear it four times a day.”

Helena still doesn’t say anything.

“And since I kissed you, since I _left_ you, every time I’ve heard it, I’ve thought of you.”

“And what does that mean?”

“I didn’t know. For too long, I didn’t. But now… it means I’m free.”

Again Helena finds herself unable to speak. She may have said “oh.”

“And it means that if you are too, then we—”

This time Helena is the one who moves. One more kiss, just one more at first—so soft, this light and lightness, the first kiss they should have had. Then another and another and another, each one a buoyant press, a weight that is no weight at all.

They are embracing as if the world will end should they stop: the scale of this moment.

“You’ve really come back here,” Helena says. “You’ve truly decided?”

“Yes.” She kisses Helena again. Her hands find Helena’s face, her hair. “Nothing but yes.”

“And your decision was truly… me?”

Myka, transcendently, again: “Nothing but yes.”

****

When they finally, _finally_ , are in a hotel room, Helena finds herself frustrated that so much of the _work_ has been done for her: Myka’s hair is down, and she wears no constraining uniform. All this had been, is, a wonderful sight of course, but Helena complains, “I had wanted to get you _free_.”

She doesn’t register what she’s said until Myka laughs and says, “You did. You are.” She pulls Helena close, closer; begins to pull clothing away from her body; begins to put her mouth where the clothing so lately was. “I wanted to do the same for you.” These words flow warmly across and down the curve of Helena’s shoulder.

“You did,” Helena breathes back. “You are.”

Their first night together holds nothing so pure as magic—Helena had imagined it in so many different ways that magic would obviously have been required in order to overlay them all, to produce a first time that could in any way live up to all the possible first times, place them layer upon layer, a near-infinity of all-at-once first times. Instead, there is just one. But she supposes there is some magic to it after all, because in her imaginings, _first_ had also meant _only_. And the reality is not like that at all.

It is not singular. And yet it is, in that it is a beginning.

For some time, what has begun is unclear. Myka continues to appear as she did before, in a bi- or tri-weekly rotation—though now she lets Helena know precisely when that will happen, and Helena counts the days until those days. They talk on the telephone, they communicate in other available electronic ways… but Myka also ceremoniously presents Helena with paper copies of her schedule, pulled from her hat. Early on, Helena asks—demands—“Did anyone ever leave notes in your hat for you?” She means, did _he_ ever, and Myka hears the jealousy; she says, “It’s not a competition… but no. No one ever did.” Thus Helena sees to it that every time Myka’s hat is near her, she tucks a note inside it.

For some time, Myka gives Helena precisely the romantic storybook _sometimes_ on which she had tried, in what seems the ancient past, not to let her thoughts dwell. Their affair is concentrated, condensed, just as their conversations once were. But the words they used to say in the bar, the ways in which they said them, the ways that those ways of saying words changed over time: those had been surrogates for physical intimacy. Now when they speak, in public in front of others, or softly to each other in the dark, the words are no substitute for that intimacy, but an extension of it.

For some time, Helena lives for the whispered room number—for the lift in her heart that follows on the whispered room number. And the next lift when she knocks on the door of the room, and the next when she is feeling anew not the astonishment of their first kiss, but the relief of their second. And the next and the next and the next, for Myka in intimacy is still herself but also someone else, someone fuller, and Helena is lifted and moved as she witnesses that mysterious difference.

For some time, Helena does not think about prison. But neither does she think about freedom. For Myka, flight is—or seems to be—freedom, and Helena had both begun to feel, and consciously stopped herself from feeling, that Myka could serve, for her, as a similar means to reach an open sky. But as time adds to time, the metaphors chafe. Helena tries to let them be.

When Myka asks to meet Christina and Steve, Helena’s heart lifts in a new way.

They are wary at first, these only other people who matter, but Myka doesn’t push. Rather, Helena watches, listens, as Myka carefully performs the beginning of a painstaking, precise rapport very similar to what she had built with Helena.

On the night of that meeting, Christina, curled in her bed and nearing sleep, yawns at Helena, “I think I like the pilot.”

An echo of a flight attendant’s knowing words: “The way you said ‘the pilot.’”

****

During an eventual night, Myka says, “It’s funny. I thought my first love would always be my best love.”

“Your husband?”

“What? No, no: flying. Better than anything. Flying.”

“As I understand it, that is what many of you seem to believe. Pilots.” After Myka first kissed her, after Myka had gone away, Helena encountered a book about flight and piloting; she had resisted reading it, but then succumbed. Myka had, in retrospect, seemed quintessential, a distilled pilot. And nothing has happened, even now, to alter Helena’s assessment.

“Well. I’ve believed it for a long time. Then you came along. And you know what?”

“Hm. What.” Helena is prepared not to believe, for any length of time, whatever Myka says next; one of intimate-Myka’s unexpected quirks is the saying of occasional surprisingly, and surprisingly florid, romantic things. Her later embarrassment at these utterances has made Helena discount them.

Myka turns on the light beside the bed, and Helena blinks in surprise. Myka raises herself up on an elbow to look down into Helena’s eyes. She dips her head down for a swift kiss—a touch, a go—and then lets herself fall, her mouth landing near Helena’s ear. “Now it’s a tie.”

Those words—said with a peculiar wonder, as if in apostasy—should not make Helena feel as if she herself might take flight… but they do.

****

**Epilogue**

“Where is Myka _right this minute_?” Christina demands.

“I haven’t checked in a while. Go ahead and use my telephone—oh, and try flightview first; something was wrong with it earlier.”

Moments later, Christina reports, “It’s still down. But flightaware says she’s twenty minutes away from BOI.”

Helena glances at the clock. It’s early in Myka’s schedule today, but at least she seems to be on time. Today will take her from Boise to Sacramento, then on to Los Angeles, and finally back to Salt Lake City. She’ll get home late, but Helena has every intention of keeping herself awake. Myka’s three-day trips still feel long and torturous… perhaps they always will. But she and Christina know a great deal now about flight tracking apps and sites, and they follow Myka through the sky as best they can.

As a place to live, Helena finds Salt Lake City generally fine. As a place to work on making a home, one that contains herself and Christina and Myka, it is nearly as bright as the aluminum roof that adorns its Mormon Tabernacle.

As a place to begin to consider making a home, it had seemed somewhat less bright.

Myka had raised the possibility by saying, “I want to be with you. I’m hoping you want to be with me. But I’ve looked into the possibility of this being my home base, and it won’t work.”

Helena had come quite close to shedding very honestly confused tears.

Which Myka had misread. “No, no; it isn’t an ultimatum. We can make it work this way. I love you,” she said, for the first time. For the first time as such. “I love you. We can make it work.”

Helena told Steve, “She said she loves me.”

“Do you believe her?” he asked.

“Yes. And to your next question: also yes. Yes, I do.”

He chuckled. “You actually are free to go. I’m not, and that’s okay.”

“But after what you did for me. For us.” He could have talked her out of it. If he wanted to.

“Which, to overuse a word, I was free to do. Does Christina want to go?”

“Christina asked if Myka would give her flying lessons in Utah.”

“So much for gratitude.” He laughed again, but this time with a touch of regret.

“She’ll be lost without you. I will be lost without you.”

“Fortunately you’ll have a pilot to keep you on course.”

But Helena did have certain reservations that had nothing to do with Steve. That she and Myka loved each other was true; it was more true every day. But Myka would not cease to be a pilot. “How do I know it won’t happen again?” Helena asked. “You’ll fly somewhere; you’ll meet a bartender. How do I know it won’t happen again?”

“You don’t. How do I know you won’t assault someone else?”

“You don’t,” Helena had to admit.

“The world’s an uncertain place.”

“A collection of uncertain places. Among which you fly.”

“Among which I fly,” Myka agreed.

“I don’t want it to happen again. Any of it.”

“That’s good, because I don’t either. And by the way,” Myka began.

“By the way what?”

“I didn’t meet a bartender.”

“What?” Because if there was one thing Helena had lately tried to be honest with herself about—

“I met you.”

It wasn’t any sort of grand beginning: two people met in a bar.

Why does anything happen? Helena does not want to believe that she had to be incarcerated _so that_ she could one day be happy. So that she would be forced to pay an up-front price for happiness? But that is the truth as she has found it.

A pilot, a spark. A whiskey and soda.

Helena is no longer a bartender. Not as such. She does still mix the occasional whiskey and soda, although she has been known to grumble about having to take the time to _open a bottle of club soda_ instead of just reaching for a dispensing hose. “And why exactly can’t you make your own drinks?” she has been known to inquire, though she knows what the answer will be.

“I can. But I still like watching you.”

A pilot, her voice. And something very like freedom.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> original part 3 tumblr tags: it's funny that I would rant about expertise and what all in relation to a piece that I don't think is up to snuff, but I would like to think that it's at least not harsh, and what I will say to close this out is, with regard to Kate McKinnon's 'Hallelujah' performance, I wept not in response to the lyrics I usually do, (that's 'the minor fall and the major lift'), but rather when she sang 'I told the truth; I didn't come to fool you'


End file.
